Jessica Fain: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. The way I think about this right now is just where humans are still necessary and great product thinkers are still necessary is on the front end deciding what to prioritize and build, on the back end, determining if this is good and ready, essentially judgment and taste. And then there's distribution I think is such an underappreciated new bottleneck, because as you said, there's so much shit out there. Just like, how do we get anyone to pay attention to any of this stuff? Every day, there's a new life-changing product. So I feel like that's going to be a big problem. Oh, I want you to do a whole episode on distribution because I feel this so much. If everyone thinks they can build the next sales force on their own, by the way, I don't believe that, then you're going to have just a flood of available tools. And who gets the attention? It is still going to be who has the marketing dollars, who has the brand reputation, who is the existing customer base. Distribution is everything. And I think the quintessential example we've seen here is with Gemini and Google's tools and just their total continued dominance in that market because of tools of distribution. And I think it's really fun to see. I think the other piece I would say that's underrated there is trust building, trust with your users, but also with your internal teams. We're seeing even model companies hire at a huge rate right now. So you are still working with colleagues. You are still working with millions of users, and alongside distribution is trust, and that is a function of influence and empathy. Along these lines, what I wonder is, we talked about these other two kind of areas, humans are still valuable and great product leaders are still valuable deciding what to build, knowing if it's ready and awesome. I wonder how good AI will get at those things because we never thought AI would be amazing at coding and now it's 100% of code will be soon written by AI. And I've actually been building a bunch of stuff and I just find Codex and Claude Code are so good at actually giving you ideas for what to build. I'm just like, "What should I do to make this better?" And it's like, "Here's 10 ideas." And then they're like, "That is a really good idea." So I think it'll get there. People underestimate how good it'll get at these things, I think.…

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